Nancy's Group

Nancy is a member of Emukaya Group in Kakamega North District. She is pictured here in a group of seven One Acre Fund group leader farmers. The group leaders represent a total of 70 individual One Acre Fund farmers who are not pictured here. Nancy has been selected to act as the Kiva group representative and is standing on the right with her hand raised. She and the other farmers represented in this group are each receiving inputs for a quarter acre of maize and a quarter acre of sorghum or millet. Each farmer is receiving an average input loan of 5,349 shillings for maize, millet and sorghum cultivation.

Nancy is 44 years old and has been a farmer for 23 years. She works as a farmer to provide for her five children. The community and other farmers know Nancy as friendly, hard-working, reliable and trustworthy. Other than farming, she is also involved in community groups such as the women's group, savings group and prayer group. Nancy described her harvest last year as good, but she hopes to have an even better one with the support of One Acre Fund and the other farmers in her group.

Nancy first enrolled with One Acre Fund in 2010 and is now preparing to be a One Acre Fund farmer during the 2014 Long Rains season. Nancy joined One Acre Fund in order to get the best seed prices, learn new farming methods and obtain fertilizer and hybrid seeds. She also volunteered to be a group leader and Kiva representative because she is an active community member who wants to help more farmers and spread the story about One Acre Fund farmers.

Nancy plans to use the money she earns from her next harvest to send children to school and buy a cow. She notes that working with One Acre Fund has led to many benefits for One Acre Fund farmers. Nancy’s own life was improved because she has more profits from harvest, has more farm training, has more farm group support, and was able to save money and feed the family.

One Acre Fund focuses on working with smallholder farmers across Kenya. The organization pre-purchases seeds and fertilizer when prices are low and passes the cost savings onto the farmers. Nancy and the Emukaya Group will use the Kiva loan to cover this initial cost of purchasing the seeds and fertilizer package from One Acre Fund. One Acre Fund continues to provide training and support throughout the planting and harvesting season to ensure a good harvest and repayment. With support from One Acre Fund and your loan, these farmers will have a chance at a successful harvest, increased profits and improved lives.

The field officer is also included in the photo and is standing on the left of the photo.

Additional Information

More information about this loan

This loan is part of One Acre Fund's integrated agricultural package, which provides groups of smallholder farmers with seeds and fertilizers on credit, onsite agricultural training, and insurance options. Borrowers also have the option to purchase solar lanterns as part of the loan package.

To give borrowers more flexibility, One Acre Fund permits them to switch groups, drop out of the program and change their loan amounts before receiving their inputs. To accommodate this, Kiva allows One Acre Fund to post loans for groups that may change in size and membership. Only the group leader is featured in the photo, representing the loans for each of his or her individual group members.

If a lender makes a loan to group containing a borrower that drops out, the lender will receive the full loan amount for that borrower back at the end of the harvest season. If the lender makes a loan to a group containing a borrower that decides to take a smaller loan amount after the loan is funded, the lender will receive the repayments from the smaller loan amount plus the full difference between the two loan amounts at the end of the harvest season.

This Kiva loan will be used to provide borrowers with needed goods or services, as opposed to cash or financial credit.

About One Acre Fund

With this loan, One Acre Fund will purchase fertilizer, seeds, and other important farming inputs to distribute to this farmer group during Kenya's next planting season in February. This distribution of farming inputs is part of One Acre Fund's integrated agriculture package, which includes training, reliable input supply (such as fertilizer and seeds), credit and insurance. Clients enroll between July and October for the following planting season, which begins in February. By purchasing inputs during these months, One Acre Fund is able to take advantage of the historically low farm input prices during this time of year in Kenya.

Members of One Acre Fund form groups in which each borrower guarantees the loans of all other borrowers in the group. One Acre Fund differs from a traditional microfinance institution, however, by allowing groups to split before the delivery of inputs at planting time. If a group were to split, each of the two new groups would have fewer members that could support a delinquency or default from a member. This may represent a different risk than that for a traditional MFI’s group loan.

Important Information About the Risk of One Acre Fund
One Acre Fund is not assigned a risk rating on Kiva. This is due to the fact that One Acre Fund’s business model differs enough from traditional microfinance models that Kiva’s current risk rating system is not applicable in accurately reflecting the risk assessment. Key risks and further information in making loans to One Acre Fund borrowers can be found on the organization’s partner page.

This is a Group Loan

In a group loan, each member of the group receives an individual loan but is part of a larger group of individuals. The group is there to provide support to the members and to provide a system of peer pressure, but groups may or may not be formally bound by a group guarantee. In cases where there is a group guarantee, members of the group are responsible for paying back the loans of their fellow group members in the case of delinquency or default.

Kiva's Field Partners typically feature one borrower from a group. The loan description, sector, and other attributes for a group loan profile are determined by the featured borrower's loan. The other members of the group are not required to use their loans for the same purpose.